


A Good Man

by KaCole



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Longing, Love, One Shot, Romance, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 21:19:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11859870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaCole/pseuds/KaCole
Summary: Cassian can't see himself as a good man, but in her arms, he thinks he might just discover what that means again.





	A Good Man

Perhaps he’d cared once, a very long time ago, what other people thought about him. Maybe there had been a time that he’d clung onto the notion that he is a good man who did bad things for the right reasons. Because someone must, in this stinking fight, someone has to creep into the dirty places to retrieve the glimmers of hope buried in the dark. He’d lost that conceit long ago, and now he sees himself for what he is. A spy. An assassin. A darkling who pulls the trigger and doesn’t lose sleep about it. Maybe the galaxy will be a better place for it, one day. But Cassian Andor will always live in the shadows. 

And then she comes.

Shining a light between the cracks.

He almost hates her at first. He hates the way she’s in his head when he looks down the barrel of his sniper’s rifle on Eadu. He despises himself for not taking the shot, and honestly, it’s an impressive feat to hate himself more than he already does. He doesn’t want to care what she thinks of him. Why should it matter if she thinks he’s a good man or not? He know what he is.

And yet, when he looks at her he sees himself in her eyes. She’s a mirror, reflecting back the worst, and the best of him. And that’s what stopped him, he thinks, from adding Galen Erso to his dark tally. It must be that, because he certainly doesn’t care for this woman. She’s a soldier in all but name, made of hard edges and raw need, and he really doesn’t want to step out of his shadow-world and into her light. 

She’d probably burn him. 

He doesn’t look at her eyes. He takes careful precautions not to notice the way her dark hair falls out of its rough ponytail and over her face. He is not moved by the almost-quirk of her lips as she smiles when he tells her he’ll fight with her, although by then he’s not sure if he’s fighting with her or for her. When she steps closer to him, later, after some unlikely calamity snatched them from Scarif and presented them with a second life, he finally sees the flush of her cheeks and he wonders at it.

It can’t be for him. 

He doesn’t dream of Jyn Erso. He doesn’t wake, bruised and sweating, with the heat of her lips against his fading back into a dream. Why would he?

He remains gruff, because that’s safer, but he helps her with this and that. Finding a permanent room when she decides to stay, because where else can she go now? Settling into the daily routine of the base. Showing her where to get new boots and spare ammo.

She glances his way often enough, and he wonders if she knows it jolts him when their eyes meet. When her hands brushes his, it’s like there’s a live thing coiling between them, ready to snatch him away. 

He wonders if she knows he could lose himself in her. 

“You are a good man,” she tells him quietly, seemingly at random, but the look in her eyes makes him think she’s been working her way up to this for a while. 

He takes her hand, and looks at it for a long time. A small hand, with short nails and hard-worn skin for someone so young. Like his own. She has a crescent scar on the inside of her wrist. A fragment of an ancient shell, she tells him, that exploded in a field they were digging to plant skycorn. 

Impulsively he kisses the scar. 

His eyes widened, his pulse quickens, because he didn’t intend such an intimate gesture, and he’s afraid she’ll push him away.

Instead, she leans into him, her lips brushing his. Her lips are light and soft, made of dreams and hope, and somehow the world becomes a brighter, cleaner place. 

A good man.

He lets himself wonder if it’s true. 

It isn’t, not yet, he decides, but in her arms he thinks he could be.


End file.
